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Simultaneous measurement of tinnitus pitch and loudness
1Psychology Department, University of Maryland at College Park.
Objective:
Simultaneous measures of the frequency and level of a pure tone matching the predominant pitch and loudness of tinnitus were obtained using four interleaved staircases.
Design:
Two staircases in a forced-choice procedure tracked two frequencies, one higher and one lower than the predominant pitch of the tinnitus, while two staircases tracked two levels, one louder and one softer than the tinnitus.
Results:
The standard deviation of the pitch matches to tinnitus using the forced-choice procedure with four staircases (4SFC) exceeded that from a double staircase (2SFC) task in which the level of the matching tone was fixed, whereas the 2SFC and 4SFC tasks had similar SDs for loudness matches to tinnitus when the frequency of the matching tone was fixed and for matches to the pitch or loudness of external tones. As the level of the tone matching the tinnitus pitch in the 4SFC task increased relative to that of the 2SFC task, so did its frequency.
Conclusion:
These data may be interpreted as indicating that tinnitus is a fluctuant signal, and that matches of pure tones to tinnitus are not single-valued.